Andreas Wilson, brooding and handsome, plays young Erik Ponti, who seems unreachably vicious in the film's opening scenes. Subjected to regular beatings from his control-freak stepfather (Johan Rabaeus), the teenager takes out his anger on weaker classmates; after one particularly ugly pummeling, the headmaster labels Erik ''evil in its purest form" and shows him the door.
Sent for his final year to a prestigious private academy called Stjarnsberg, the chastened Erik vows to his mother (Marie Richardson) that he'll be good. That's before he understands his new school's inflexible social hierarchy: Students in the dining hall are seated in order of peerage and wealth, and when Erik asks about the others, he's blandly informed, ''They don't belong here."
Upperclassmen like the ascot-wearing Silverhielm (Gustaf Skarsgard) and his toady Dahlen (Jesper Salen) enforce obedience in the younger boys with violent punishments for infractions real and imagined while the teachers, a mix of duffers and unrepentant Nazis, look the other way. Erik's response to his tormentors is one they've never encountered. He simply says no.
The hero's best friend, a glasses-wearing wonk named Pierre (Henrik Lindstrom), references Gandhi's passive resistance, but there's something spookier about Erik's refusal to play by the rules. He knows he could reduce the older boys to entitled pulp but chooses not to. This intransigence makes Silverhielm and Dahlen insane with fury, which they take out on Pierre and other weaker prey. Something has to give.
Based on an autobiographical novel by the Swedish writer-journalist Jan Guillou, ''Evil" is extremely watchable, even if it never goes as deep as it should. Hafstrom keeps the story moving propulsively forward, helped by Peter Mokrosinski's fluid camerawork, and the characters are well cast and played to a man and boy.
